Conductive Polymer-based TDR Sensing Ice Accretion for Wind Turbine Blade

Icing accretion of wind turbine blades has been regarded as an important issue for the wind turbine industry, since it could cause various problems and even impact the wind power production. Most available methods or sensors to detect icing events for wind turbine blade are single-point detection. A new alterative approach based on a TDR technique is firstly introduced in this paper. A strip TDR sensor was designed and fabricated in the laboratory. Using this strip TDR sensor, the simulated icing accretion process on blade model was successfully monitored. The icing rate can be quantitatively determined by interpreting TDR signals. The test on icing formation of two sponge patches indicates that TDR has potential advantage of distributed detecting icing events on wind turbine blades. doi: 10.12783/SHM2015/38